The second Continuing Education Course (CEC) I followed was given byTiina Heino and Katri Larmo of the Terkko Meilahti Campus Library at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

The full title of the course was Visibility and impact – library’s new role: How the library can support the researcher to get visibility and generate impact to researcher’s work. You can read the abstract here.

Furthermore we got information on CiteULike, ORCID, Faculty of 1000 Posters and Pinterest. Also services developed in Terkko, such as ScholarChart and TopCited Articles, were shortly demonstrated.

What I especially liked in the hands on session is that the tutors had prepared a wikispace with all the information and links on the main page ( https://visibility2012.wikispaces.com) and a separate page for each participant to edit (here is my page). You could add links to your created accounts and embed widgets for Mendeley.

There was sufficient time to practice and try the tools. And despite the great number of participants there was ample room for questions (& even for making a blog draft ;)).

The main message of the tutors is that the process of publishing scientific research doesn’t end at publishing the article: it is equally important what happens after the research has been published. Visibility and impact in the scientific community and in the society are crucial for making the research go forward as well as for getting research funding and promoting the researcher’s career. The Fig below (taken from the presentation) visualizes this process.

The tutors discussed ORCID, Open Researcher and contributor ID, that will be introduced later this year. It is meant to solve the author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication by central registry of unique identifiers for each author (because author names can’t be used to reliably identify all scholarly author). It will be possible for authors to create, manage and share their ORCID record without membership fee. For further information see several publications and presentations by Martin Fenner. I found this one during the course while browsing Mendeley.

Once published the author’s work can be promoted using bookmarking tools, like CiteULike, Connotea and Mendeley. You can easily registrate for Connotea and Mendeley using your Facebook account. These social bookmarking tools are also useful for networking, i.e. to discover individuals and groups with the same field of interest. It is easy to synchronize your Mendeley with your CiteULike account.

Mendeley is available in a desktop and a web version. The web version offers a public profile for researchers, a catalog of documents, and collaborative groups (the cloud of Mendeley). The desktop version of Mendeley is specially suited for reference management and organizing your PDF’s. That said Mendeley seems most suitable for serendipitous use (clicking and importing a reference you happen to see and like) and less useful for managing and deduplicating large numbers of records, i.e. for a systematic review.
Also (during the course) it was not possible to import several PubMed records at once in either CiteULike or Mendeley.

What stroke me when I tried Mendeley is that there were many small or dead groups. A search for “cochrane” for instance yielded one large group Cochrane QES Register, owned by Andrew Booth, and 3 groups with one member (thus not really a group), with 0 (!) to 6 papers each! It looks like people are trying Mendeley and other tools just for a short while. Indeed, most papers I looked up in PubMed were not bookmarked at all. It makes you wonder how widespread the use of these bookmarking tools is. It probably doesn’t help that there are so many tools with different purposes and possibilities.

Another tool that we tried was Altmetric. This is a free bookmarklet on scholarly articles which allows you to track the conversations around scientific articles online. It shows the tweets, blogposts, Google+ and Facebook mentions, and the numbers of bookmarks on Mendeley, CiteULike and Connotea.

I liked altmetrics*, but saying that it is suitable for scientific metrics is a step too far. For people interested in this topic I would like to refer -again- to a post of Martin Fenner on altmetrics (in general). He stresses that “usage metrics” has its limitations because of its proness to “gaming” (cheating).

But the current workshop didn’t address the shortcomings of the tools, for it was meant as a first practical acquaintance with the web 2.0 tools.

For the other tools (Faculty of 1000 Posters, Pinterest) and the services developed in Terkko, such as ScholarChart and TopCited Articles, see the wikipage and the presentation:

*Coincidentally I’m preparing a post on handy chrome extensions to look for tweets about a webpage. Altmetric is another tool which seems very suitable for this purpose

To me, Twitter is an essential source for information. It is an easy way to keep updated in my field, it is fast and it is an ideal networking site to build relationships. Without it I wouldn’t have ‘met’ so many excellent and interesting people. In fact those people are my living filter to the Twitter noise (see previous post): I only follow people with whom I share the same interest (at least in some respects). Twitter also is one of my inspirational sources for blogging, and vice versa it is an outlet for my blog posts.

Unfortunately, Twitter has one shortcoming: Tweets are volatile. Twitter is designed to catch conversations real time. Therefore it is not easy to “keep” Tweets or read them later. Usually your tweets get lost after 7 to 10 days and cease to be found by Twitter Search. Some tweets can still be Googled, but that is not a secure way of keeping tweets.

At least I safeguard my favorited tweets by taking a RSS to my favs (yellow starred in Fig).

But this is just a way to conserve your favorite tweets for a (more) prolonged time.

What you also would like is to “archive” the URLs of the actual pages that seem interesting (the red http links in the tweets).

I used Google Notebook for that. That was near perfect:the free online Google application allowed saving and organizing clips of information (via a Firefox add-on) while online (see Wikipedia). The information was saved to “notebooks” that could be made “public” and automatically fed into Twitter to share with others. It was easy tracing articles back by searching or browsing.

Packrati.us is a simple bookmarking service. Once you register, they follow your Twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, they are added to your Delicious.com bookmarks.

So, for instance I retweeted @amcunningham and @jrbtrip, who link to an interesting article regarding bias in dissemination & publication of research. The link is a shortened URL.

When I visit My Delicious (http://delicious.com/) via an add-on in Firefox, I see that the link is automatically saved in Delicious.

The bookmark shows

the link to the URL (title),

the number of people bookmarking the link,

the actual tweet mentioned in notes (more notes can be added),

the extended url,

an automatic tag (packrati.us) chosen to indicate that this bookmark is automatically imported from Twitter and other tags that I manually added to facilitate retrieval.

When you click on the link you go to the actual article. I can always find the bookmark when I search for tags like bias

The following links can be automatically loaded into Delicious:

Links in your tweets and retweets (tweets you resend)

Links in tweets directed to you (send by others)

Links in your favorited tweets (!) (quite new)

You can choose to:

Expand the URLs that have been shortened with an URL shortening service

Replace existing bookmarks (no duplication, old tags are kept.

Not convert hashtags from tweets to tags for the bookmarks (default = tagging hashtags)

Exclude tweets with specific tags (new)

Exlude tweets from a selection of sources

Add the sender of the tweet (other than yourself)

Packrati.us is under continuous development, some features have just been added. I love the new feature that favorited tweets can be kept (alas it doesn’t work retrospectively, so the above favs are not included).

In practice you can get a lot of bookmarks if you tweet/favorite a lot. It is good to exclude some tweets beforehand and imo necessary to prune the tweets afterwards and add tags. Otherwise it becomes a (disorderly) mess.

Although Packrati.us links only Twitter and Delicious, you can use each platform separately. I also use Delicious to manually add bookmarks of websites I like. Yes, thanks to Packrati.us I learned to love delicious again.

In short this post describes that (some) Top 100 etc lists may not be as useful or innocent as they seem. Some of these lists are created by real scam-sites, who’s only goal is to make money via click-troughs and to get as much traffic as possible, via YOU (and me)!

The scam appears in many guises.

As submissions for a blog carnival, i.e. 100-weight-loss-tips-tricks.

An offer of a health care student who asks you to do a guest post (you only have to link back to his/her site).

In the form of a mail, dropping you a quick line that you’re included in a top 100 list, possibly worth mentioning to your audience.

You just noticed a top 100 list with excellent sites, worth mentioning on Twitter or Friendfeed, so your followers become aware of the sites and pass the message.

The first two are pretty obvious scam. The latter two are more difficult to see through.

Why do I write another post? Because it happened again, today. And I think I should bring the message home more clearly.

Below you see what happens. Berci has found a list with 50 great tools to “Double check your Doctor”. He tweets the link to what he considers a great resource list, and in no time the message and the link are tweeted several times. Some people also post a link on their blog.

Finally this will result in more traffic to the website onlinenursingclasses and a higher rank in Google.

Indeed 12 hours after Berci’s tweet, searching for “50 Great Tools to Double Check Your Doctor” (between quotes) gives just 21 hits (similar hits not shown), many of which can be traced back to the twitter posts.
All but one are positive: the last hit is my warning, which was only received by ahier and TheSofa. Ahier deleted his original positive tweet from Twitter.

Also worrying is that the spam site was bookmarked by various Stumble upon visitors. And that the one person that made the Stumble upon review also “liked” similar sites, like Online Classes and Learn Gasms. So probably a whole team takes care that the site is socially bookmarked. When several people “like” a site others may be attracted to the site as well. That is the principle of social bookmarking sites. And you and I do the rest….

I sometimes see other libloggers linking to sites like these and I have a word of advice: don’t. When we link to low-content sites from our high-content sites, we are telling Google and everyone that we think that the site we are linking to is in some way authoritative, even if we’re saying they’re dirty scammers. We’re helping their page rank and we’re slowly, infinitesimally almost, decreasing the value of Google and polluting the Internet pool in which we frequently swim. Don’t link to spammers.

How do you know that you can’t trust that particular site?

Well here are some features I’ve noticed (for the spam sites in “my”field)

All the sites that publicized such list were educational, mostly directed at nurses or other health practitioners. Some even end at org. Examples:

nursingschools.net

associatedegree.org

rncentral.com

Learn-gasm

onlineclasses.org

onlinenursepractitionerschools.com

searchenginecollege.com

collegedegree.com

ultrasoundtechnicianschools.org

phlebotomytechnicianschools.com

MiracleFruitPlus.com.

All sites have a Quick-degree, nursing degree, technician school etc finder. Mostly it is the only information at the ABOUT-section (?!)

The home page often contains prominent links (clicks) to Kaplan University, University of Phoenix, Grand Canyon University, and/or others.

People behind the site often approach you actively (below are some examples) to gain your interest.

It is unclear how the lists are made and who is behind it.

There is no real information, only lists and degree finders.

So spread the word! Be careful with those list. DON’T LINK TO THEM! And if you see a possible interesting list, first CHECK the site: WHO, WHY, WHAT, WHERE AND WHEN. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all!

Before I went on vacation (July 14th) I started a blogpost about Clinical Reader, a new aggregator. However, a Twitter riot -started July 13th- drastically changed my view of Clinical reader and I decided to await further developments till my return. Alas, things have only worsened.

The adapted blogpost consists of two parts: a neutral look from the outside (original draft) and a look behind the scenes: how social media and web 2.0 tools should not be used.

I submit this post to the Grand Rounds, not only to inform you about a potential fancy aggregator, but also to warn potential users to “look before you leap”.

Please note that the figures shown in the first part are all screendumps taken at July 13th or earlier and might no longer exist in this form (note added after publication, as all sentences in this color)

Most of these readers (can) track medical journals or news, some (can) also track blog posts and web 2.0 tools (like PeRSSonalized Medicine and MedWorm). PeRSSonalized Medicine excels by the input from the readers (doctors, health 2.0 people and patients), Amadeo and especially Medworm have large lists of journals to choose from. All these aggregators can be personalized. Of course Netvibes,I-Google andRSS-Readers give the utmost freedom in compiling list feeds, but one first has to learn how to use them. And although it is not difficult, it means a hurdle to many.

We are building a user-friendly platform that will enable medical professionals around the world the ability to easily interact with the latest developments in their respective specialties. Our aim is to bring academic content together and create a semantic digital medical library.

——————

2. What it is and what it isn’t.

Clinical Reader is website that syndicates content via RSS/Atom (aggregator), enabling busy clinicians to easily browse top medical journals, health news sources and multimedia without having a clue what RSS is about (and for free). The same is true for other aggregators discussed previously: PeRSSonalized Medicine, Amedeo and MedWorm. In fact the presentation of the feeds looks pretty similar (see Fig. for comparison of Clinical Reader and Perssonalized Medicine). Disadvantage of these kind of aggregators is that only the first items are shown, and as these often are editorials, comments, correspondence and news, the physician still has to follow the link to the journal to see most of the (true) articles.

In contrast to the aforementioned services, the “RSS-feeds” of Clinical Reader cannot be personalized (a personal selection of journals). There is however the possibility to select an entire clinical section, each with its own selection of specialist journals. And according to Rashada Henry, associate editor of ClinicalReader.com (commenting on Bertalan Mesko’s post), open or closed personal pages may become an option in due course.

3. What’s new?

As said, the idea isn’t new, Clinical Reader is an old concept in a new guise. But what a guise. It is a glimmering site with prints of the main journals on the home page. It has the appearance of an i-pod touch: you can scroll the sources with your mouse and click the ones you would like to read. Wow, I was immediately taken by it.

4. Coverage

The emphasis is on medical journals and news. But there is also a page for with a selection of 14 Medical Blogs. There are also plans to include top Twitter doctors worth following (spreadsheet prepared by Ves Dimov, MD), for nurses, open access … and top medical librarians blogs (worth following for doctors). Following Ves’ example I made a spreadsheet of useful medical librarian blogs, open to editing here

The original spreadsheet looked like this:

The preview of the medical librarian page (how it would look when incorporated) looked like this.

Apart from the fact that the site was not as revolutionary as suggested, there were some basic things about the site that were of some concern. The “About us” section contains no names, picture, verifiable info, etc. It only says: “Clinical Reader was brought to life in 2009 by a junior doctor and a small group of forward thinking young tech programmers spread across London and Toronto.” Furthermore I wondered whether NLM would ever give stars to commercial tools like this. I wondered, but no more than that….

1. Starry ethics fail
Nikki Dettmar, a medical librarian at the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM) did take a closer look. In a blogpost Starry ethics fail she says that:

it is with concern that I’ve heard about some of my colleagues promoting and collaborating with the newly launched company, Clinical Reader.

Why? (red scrawl emphasis mine)

This above-the-page-fold graphic is intentional (not accidental, this is clear marketing intent to lend quick visual credibility to the organization) and currently displayed everywhere (homepage, sections pages, multimedia page, the newsletter, etc.) throughout the resource.

It is bogus as far as the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is concerned since the U.S. Government doesn’t endorse or grant 5 stars to anything. The NLM Copyright Information page offers more elaboration, ….

Clinical Reader also currently uses two copyrighted images on their Partners (specific original source, copyright notice at bottom) and Advertising pages (from somewhere on Signalnoise). A ‘credit’ link to a source doesn’t honor an image copyright. (….) Commercial organizations can well afford to purchase or design their own graphics.

In a later post, Nikki also showed that the multimedia wrongfully used SpringerImages, that must not be (…) used for commercial purpose including the placement or upload of the Licensed Content on a commercial entity’s internet website.

In addition, the logo that was used by Clinical Reader to indicate the untangling of a maze of information (that I copied in my original draft above), was taken without permission from the website of FeedStitch where it was created by their designer Owen Shifflett. (see discussion).

You kind of wonder what wasn’t copied.

3. Threat to Nikki (Eagledawg) via Twitter

For me the most astonishing event was the immature “response” of Clinical Reader to Nikki after publishing her first post with appropriate critique. It was in the from of a real threat.

I immediately responded (while packing) to the initial threat and so did dozens of other medical librarians. Mostly on Twitter and Friendfeed, but also via their blogs (see below and Nikki’s blog). Some also retracted their initial support (i.e. see this mail of Connie Schardt, who like many of us -including me- was “temporarily dazzled by the flashy display and ease of use of the product.”)

4. Change of Twitter-accounts, deleting tweets

Quite confusingly Twitter-accounts have been changed and deleted. First initials appeared after tweets to designate the person who tweeted for @clinicalreader, which I thought was a good thing. I followed @clinicalreader, but now the account was discontinued. The archive was kept at @clinical_tweets, which vanished as well. Now there is @clinical_reader, that states that tweeting has not really begun?? The only Clinical Reader account I know of is that of allan_marks. ALL previous tweets have been deleted. What remains are dm’s (direct messages) and tweets that are preserved by services like QuoteURL.(for a detailed account of the switching of the original Twitter account’s name ‘at the speed of light’ see this blogpost of pegasuslibrarian)

It is all very confusing. Why would one do that other to conceal what has been said?

One salient detail. At their website Clinicalreader still refers to @clinicalreader, which is taken over by someone taking the opportunity to register the account when it moved to @clinical_tweets

5. More lying

There are several examples of making up retweets (quoting someone), see here (@ClinicalReader “I didn’t RT anything from y’all. Y’all aren’t very good at the whole social media thing, huh?”-David Rothman) and here (@ClinicalReader – “Would you mind not attributing fabricated quotes to me please? I never said this: http://tr.im/sCFb#ClinicalCheater“) (source: 6)

6. Denial

The behaviors of the ones in charge are so immature. It’s really unbelievable. You always have to take critique seriously, and if you choose to use social media and make a mistake, than apologize openly (see the blogpost of Peter Murray below, 7).

Look at this discussion with Ben Goldacre (thanks Nikki). It is really ridiculous, QuoteURL: one, two, three, and four. Clinical Reader is playing dumb.

I might not have been exhaustive, but I know enough for the moment. Also in my eyes, Clinical Reader has lost all its credibility.

Reference Management software, shut down of 5 Google apps and a plane that crashed. What have they in common? Nothing, except that these three unrelated subjects all reached me via Twitter last Thursday eve.

[2] Twitter is also a useful tool for up to date information and exchange of thoughts. For instance some tweeple (people on Twitter) had been asking about free reference management software. I had retweeted (RT, resend) the message and Thursday eve DrShock (of Dr Shock MD, PhD) tweeted a very useful link to Wikipedia which compared all reference management software, which was retweeted to the Twitter community.

[3] @Symtym (of the blog Symtym) had just learned me how to use Google Notebook to clip and collect information as you surf the web, organize the notes in notebooks and publish the public notes automatically to twitter via twitterfeed. I found it real handy and gathered some material to write a post about it.

What are the alternatives? Soon @DrCris, author of several blogs including Applequack, tweeted on a solution soon to come: “Evernote is working on a Google notebook importer“. I heard great things about Evernote, many doctors seem to use it, so I might as well give it a try.

Diigo is also planning to make a GN importer (see here). Presumably other tools will follow soon.